Combining Stellar And Exoplanetary Models: Uncertainties And Constraints On Planetary Compositions

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Scientific paper

With well over 100 transiting planets and thousands of candidates, we now have access to a statistically significant ensemble of planets. In order to take the most out of these statistics and reveal any correlations that could shed light on planetary/stellar formation and evolution models, we need to model the systems as accurately and homogeneously as possible. Relying on a database of stellar and planetary evolution models, we present SET, a tool to model both the host star and the planet in a consistent way, by keeping tracks of the correlations between the inferred parameters.
First we compare wildly used stellar evolution models in order to estimate the magnitude of intrinsic errors. When fixing mass and age we find that errors on the stellar effective temperature are relatively small (less than 1.5%), but that those on the mean stellar density are about 7%. For transiting systems, this translates into a 1-2% error on the planetary radius. In reality errors accumulate over that value. For example systems modelled with solar composition tracks can have planetary radii that systematically underestimated by up to 10% for very metal-rich stars ([Fe/H] 0.4).
We then apply our method to known transiting exoplanets,whit the aim to accurately derive their bulk composition. As shown for the CoRoT star-planet systems modelled with SET (CoRoT-8 to 18), the uncertainties remain numerous. Stellar ages are particularly difficult to constrain. We show that PMS solutions always complement the traditional MS solutions. Furthermore we stress that the non-gaussian solutions have to be properly accounted for in statistical studies of
exoplanetary systems.
Finally we present results of the Kepler-9 system, the first multiple transiting planetary systems. We show that the relative composition of the two Saturn-mass planets -- Kepler-9b and 9c -- can be much better constrained than with individual composition studies.

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